Voiceless postalveolar fricative
| Voiceless palato-alveolar sibilant | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| ʃ | |||
| IPA number | 134 | ||
| Encoding | |||
| Entity (decimal) | ʃ |
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| Unicode (hex) | U+0283 | ||
| X-SAMPA | S |
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| Kirshenbaum | S |
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| Braille |  |
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| Sound | |||
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| Voiceless postalveolar non-sibilant fricative | |
|---|---|
| ɹ̠̊˔ | |
| IPA number | 151 414 402A 429 |
| Encoding | |
| X-SAMPA | r\_-_0_r |
The voiceless palato-alveolar sibilant fricative or voiceless domed postalveolar sibilant fricative is a type of consonantal sound used in many languages, including English. In English, it is usually spelled ⟨sh⟩, as in ship.
The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is ⟨ʃ⟩, the letter esh introduced by Isaac Pitman (not to be confused with the integral symbol ⟨∫⟩). The equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is S.
An alternative symbol is ⟨š⟩, an s with a caron or háček, which is used in the Americanist phonetic notation and the Uralic Phonetic Alphabet, as well as in the scientific and ISO 9 transliterations of Cyrillic. It originated with the Czech orthography of Jan Hus and was adopted in Gaj's Latin alphabet and other Latin alphabets of Slavic languages. It also features in the orthographies of many Baltic, Finno-Lappic, North American and African languages.
Features of the voiceless palato-alveolar fricative:
In various languages, including English and French, it may have simultaneous labialization, i.e. [ʃʷ], although this is usually not transcribed.
Classical Latin did not have [ʃ], though it does occur in most Romance languages. For example, ⟨ch⟩ in French chanteur "singer" is pronounced /ʃ/. Chanteur is descended from Latin cantare, where ⟨c⟩ was pronounced /k/. The ⟨sc⟩ in Latin scientia "science" was pronounced /sk/, but has shifted to /ʃ/ in Italian scienza.
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